President Trump Profits From Trump Mobile and a $500,000 Washington Club His Sons Built on His Name

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President Donald Trump has not divested from his businesses or placed them in a blind trust during his second term, instead holding them in a revocable trust managed by his sons. In 2025, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump launched two ventures that have drawn conflict-of-interest scrutiny because they attach paid consumer products directly to the presidency. The first is Trump Mobile, a wireless service and smartphone unveiled in June 2025 whose flagship plan is branded around Trump's status as the 45th and 47th president. The second is Executive Branch, a private Washington members' club that opened in the spring of 2025 with a $500,000 initiation fee and a membership drawn from the administration's orbit.

Neither venture is run by the president day to day, and neither approaches the scale of the family's cryptocurrency income. What distinguishes them, ethics lawyers say, is that the product each sells is bound up with the office Trump holds: one through branding that invokes his presidency, the other through access to the officials of his administration.

How the Ventures Reach the President

The president's financial connection runs through the way he holds his businesses. Rather than divesting or using a blind trust, as recent presidents did, Trump keeps his assets in a trust his sons manage; his 2026 financial disclosure confirms it remains revocable, meaning he can change or end it at will. Records released during his first term show the trust is held for his "exclusive benefit" and lets him take out money at any time without telling the public, and the Trump Organization's own attorney confirmed to ProPublica that the president could withdraw funds whenever he wished. Robert Sitkoff, a Harvard Law School professor who reviewed the documents, said of the earlier hotel arrangement that "formally he is no longer the owner, but functionally he still is." Money the family earns by licensing the Trump name therefore flows back to the president.

That structure matters because the president occupies a distinct place in federal ethics law. Every other executive-branch official is barred by criminal statute (18 U.S.C. 208) from participating in government matters that affect their finances, but the president and vice president are exempt from that provision. Don Fox, a former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, told CNN the carve-out "made a lot of sense for past presidents, until Trump." The result is that the president may own and profit from businesses whose brand is his office while the appointees around him must divest or recuse.

Trump Mobile

On June 16, 2025—the tenth anniversary of Trump's first presidential campaign launch—Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump unveiled Trump Mobile, a wireless service and a planned smartphone. The flagship "47 Plan" costs $47.45 per month, a figure that refers to Trump being counted as both the 45th and 47th president, and the companion T1 Phone was announced at $499. The branding ties the product to the presidency rather than to the family name alone.

The family neither manufactures the phone nor operates the network. Trump Mobile is run by T1 Mobile LLC, which licenses the Trump name under what the company calls a limited, revocable license agreement; the Trump Mobile website states that its products "are not designed, developed, manufactured, distributed or sold by The Trump Organization." The underlying service is managed by Florida-based Liberty Mobile Wireless, founded in 2018 by Matthew Lopatin, and runs on the T-Mobile network. The arrangement is the same licensing model used across Trump-branded watches, sneakers, and books: the family collects fees for lending the name to a product built and serviced by others.

The venture drew attention for how a sitting president's brand interacts with an industry his administration regulates. Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer group Public Citizen, told CBS News that competitors with cheaper phones or plans might feel "intimidated" to advertise against the president's brand, and that foreign-made components could implicate the administration's own tariff policy. "It threatens to be a real distortion of the economy around the Trump brand," he said. Wireless carriers and handset imports fall under the Federal Communications Commission, whose chairman, Brendan Carr, was appointed by Trump.

The phone itself underdelivered on its launch claims, which bears on how much the venture trades on the office versus the product. Originally promised for August 2025, the T1 shipped roughly nine months late, in May 2026. Its "Made in the USA" marketing was dropped: when NBC News tested an early unit, the device was no longer described as American-made, and reviewers identified it as a rebadged foreign-made handset closely resembling the HTC U24 Pro. In April 2026 the company quietly rewrote its preorder terms to say it does not guarantee a device will ever be produced, and the outlet 404 Media reported unauthorized recurring charges to customers who had placed deposits.

The Executive Branch Club

In April 2025, Donald Trump Jr. and business partners opened Executive Branch, a private members' club in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. CNBC, which first reported it, described a $500,000 initiation fee plus undisclosed annual dues and a waiting list, making it one of the most expensive membership clubs in the country. Its name references the branch of government the president leads, and its draw, according to reporting, is the officials who frequent it.

The club was co-founded by Trump Jr. with Omeed Malik and Christopher Buskirk of the investment firm 1789 Capital and with Alex and Zach Witkoff, sons of Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. Reported members include White House artificial-intelligence and crypto adviser David Sacks, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, State Department Under Secretary Jacob Helberg, and crypto investors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. Access requires referral and vetting; The New York Times reported a club spokesperson saying "you have to know the owners" to get in, and Axios reported members are "tightly screened for loyalty to President Trump." Sacks, who says he cannot be an owner because he serves in government, described the aim on his podcast as a private space where members need not worry that a nearby patron is "a fake news reporter or even a lobbyist."

The club has functioned as a gathering point around official events. It hosted an afterparty following the November 2025 White House visit of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. People connected to the club told reporters that Trump himself was "expected" to appear from time to time. Observers have compared it to the former Trump International Hotel in Washington, which during Trump's first term became a hub for officials, lobbyists, and foreign dignitaries and a magnet for ethics complaints before the Trump Organization sold the lease in 2022.

The Pay-for-Access Question

The concern ethics experts raise is not that these are unusually large businesses but that they create channels through which money reaches the president's family in exchange for proximity to power. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has long argued that dues-paying access to Trump properties lets special interests "ingratiate themselves with the president," a critique that extends naturally to a $500,000 club populated by his own appointees. Kathleen Clark, a government-ethics scholar at Washington University, warned before the term began that those seeking Trump's favor would have "an easy way to do so" through investments in Trump ventures.

The president's own role in the two ventures is passive rather than active. There is no public record of Trump taking an official act to promote the phone or the club, and the White House referred questions about Trump Mobile to the Trump Organization. This distinguishes the ventures from his selection of his own Doral resort to host the 2026 G20 summit, which critics characterized as an affirmative presidential act. The Brennan Center for Justice, in a March 2026 analysis, situated arrangements like these within a broader pattern it termed "presidential profiteering," enabled by gaps in ethics rules, and noted that "little if any of this profiteering is illegal." Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter told NPR that Trump "stands alone in having such substantial financial conflicts of interest" as president and that comparable arrangements "would be a violation" for any other executive-branch official.

Trump Wine at the Coast Guard Exchange

A smaller episode in late 2025 showed the same brand-meets-government dynamic on federal property itself. In November 2025, Forbes reported that wine and cider from Trump Winery—the Charlottesville, Virginia, vineyard the family has owned since 2011—were being sold at Coast Guard Exchange stores at the service's Washington headquarters and in Centreville, Virginia. The products first surfaced in an Instagram post by an anonymous Department of Homeland Security employee and were confirmed by Forbes. Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin defended the sales, saying "the brave men and women of the USCG are pleased to be able to buy Trump wine and cider tax free"; both stores reported the products sold out.

Whether Trump personally directed the Coast Guard to stock his products—as Senator Chris Murphy later charged—is not established. No reporting has documented a presidential order, and CREW filed a FOIA request seeking exactly those records. What is documented is that a federal agency sold the sitting president's branded products on government property and publicly defended doing so. Watchdogs flagged a possible Domestic Emoluments Clause concern—the constitutional bar on a president profiting from the federal government beyond his salary—while a CREW spokesperson conceded there was "probably no explicit law being broken," calling it "an optics and an ethics issue."

The Trump Organization's Position

Ahead of the second term, the Trump Organization published a five-page "ethics white paper" stating that Trump would have no role in day-to-day management, would receive only limited financial information, and would hold his assets in a trust managed by his children. The company appointed attorney William Burck as an outside ethics adviser and pledged not to enter new deals with foreign governments, though—unlike the first-term policy—the pact places no restriction on deals with private foreign companies. Eric Trump, the company's executive vice president, has said the firm aims to "not just meet but vastly exceed" its legal and ethical obligations and has expressed frustration that the business became "a lightning rod" for conflict-of-interest criticism during the first term.

Asked about his rising wealth after his 2026 disclosure, Trump told reporters: "I'm profiting because the stock market is going up. Everybody is profiting." A Trump Organization spokesperson said the nearly 1,000-page disclosure "demonstrates a level of financial transparency unmatched in presidential history."

Scale

The president's 2025 financial disclosure puts the dollar amounts in context. The 927-page filing, released in June 2026, reported more than $1 billion in cryptocurrency income—over $600 million from Trump-branded meme coins and more than $500 million from World Liberty Financial. Against those totals, Trump-branded consumer deals appear as smaller items: $4.7 million from Trump Watches, $67,634 from Trump Sneakers and Fragrances, and similar amounts for books and other products, according to CNBC's review of the filing. Trump Mobile, a newer license, does not yet appear as a discrete line, and Executive Branch's revenue is not public.

Because federal disclosures report income ranges rather than net profit, the filings do not establish how much the president personally retained from any venture. What the phone and the club add is less a matter of their dollar totals than of their design: each attaches a paid product to the presidency itself—one sold to the public, the other to a screened circle of donors and officials—while the president who owns them, through a trust he can revoke at will, sets policy affecting the industries and individuals involved.